SF State of City speech has full house

CITY INSIDER

Heather Knight, Michael Cabanatuan

Updated 10:20 pm, Monday, January 28, 2013

We confess that while listening to a 70-minute prepared speech filled with statistics, the mind and the eye can wander. So it went during Mayor Ed Lee's State of the City speech, which we bet you didn't know was titled, "The Year of the Dragon in Retrospect."

The small auditorium at College Track on Third Street in the Bayview was packed with scores of city officials and department heads, many members of the media and a few big-name guests. Among the latter were Golden State Warriors co-owner Joe Lacob; College Track co-founder and Steve Jobs' widow, Laurene Powell Jobs; and angel investor Ron Conway(who was spotted using the women's restroom just before the speech began - hey, when you've got to go, you've got to go.)

The only former mayor we spotted in attendance was Chronicle columnist Willie Brown. Several big names were not in attendance. No Rose Pak, who is apparently on the outs with her longtime pal, Lee. Not every supervisor was there, including Supervisor Mark Farrell, who said he had a previously scheduled event at his child's school.

And, surprise, Sheriff Ross Mirkarimiwasn't there, either. That was probably a good thing, since Lee discussed Mirkarimi's domestic violence saga last year without bringing up his name, saying: "We will not let the events of 2012 set back our city's international leadership on preventing and reporting domestic violence and abuse."

The reviews of the speech afterward were mostly positive. Lee's speech was more than twice as long as Gov. Jerry Brown's State of the State address last week, but was more than six hours shorter than former Mayor Gavin Newsom's infamous 7 1/2-hour State of the City address delivered on YouTube in 2008.

But one City Hall insider still felt Lee went on too long, noting, "At least when Gavin Newsom did 7 1/2 hours on YouTube, you had the choice about whether to watch it."

- Heather Knight

Pedal power: It's no secret that San Francisco hasn't invested much money in bicycling improvements - almost nothing until the past couple of years.

But even those relatively small investments have led to a surge in the number of commuters riding their bikes in San Francisco. Over the past five years the number of trips being taken by bicycle have increased by 71 percent.

Now bike advocates and the Municipal Transportation Agency would like to see what happens if they put some real money - perhaps as much as half a billion over the next five years - behind biking.

The MTA will discuss its bicycle strategy as part of a daylong workshop Tuesday. The plan calls for increasing the percent of trips taken by bike from 3.4 percent of the total to 8-10 percent by 2018.

To get there, the agency will consider three approaches. All call for the city to complete its bicycle plan by adding 10 miles of bike lanes but then offer different levels of improvements. The most aggressive strategy would add 35 miles of new bike lanes and improve 200 miles, outfit 200 intersections to better handle bicycles, add 50,000 bike parking spaces and roll out a bike sharing system with 3,000 bikes and 300 stations.

The cost of that plan, which would equal bicycle networks in Copenhagen and Amsterdam, would cost more than $500 million. Lesser versions would cost $60 million or $190 million. The problem, regardless of which plan is pursued, will be money. Only $30 million is available for bike improvements over the next five years.

"We're seeing a lot of public support and political support," she said. "But we are lagging behind other American cities and even other California and Bay Area cities in how much of the transportation budget is dedicated toward bicycles."

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